When the five remaining candidates for the Conservative leadership line up for a debate on Channel 4 on Friday, each will be hoping for a breakthrough or trying to avoid a misstep. But while Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat will make the most of their moment in the spotlight, this contest has already narrowed to just three viable contenders.
The UK’s next prime minister will be Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt or Liz Truss but only two of the three will progress to the next stage, a ballot of the party membership. And after Thursday’s second round of voting by MPs, the question of which two will make the final cut remains wide open.
With 101 votes, Sunak is only 19 short of the 120 required to secure his place, while Mordaunt needs a further 37 and Truss 56. Truss will hope to take most of the eliminated candidate Suella Braverman’s 27 votes but some of those could move behind Badenoch, who is campaigning as a right-wing culture warrior.
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Sunak’s team hope to inherit some votes from Tugendhat, who won just 32 votes on Thursday, when the foreign affairs committee chair withdraws or is knocked out next week. But some of Tugendhat’s votes are likely to go to Mordaunt, who could also take a chunk of Badenoch’s votes when she is eliminated.
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Although the candidates are ideologically distinct, their supporters are motivated by a range of other factors, too, including career ambition, pressure from their constituency associations and personal feelings of affection or dislike. But even for those motivated primarily by personal ambition, the calculation is not straightforward.
As the front-runner, Sunak has an obvious appeal to MPs who want to back the likely winner. But the former chancellor already has the support of so many leading figures in the party that competition for ministerial posts will be keen.
Truss has a shallower bench of potential ministers, and her status as the Boris Johnson continuity candidate has won her the backing of only a handful of senior figures. For the ambitious, wavering MP, the downside of backing Truss is that, on the current numbers, she is the least likely of the three to win.
Mordaunt is, according to a number of polls, the runaway favourite among the party membership, but her parliamentary supporters, led by Andrea Leadsom and David Davis, carry a whiff of the last-chance saloon. If she wins the leadership, she will have to reach beyond her early backers for ministerial material.
Of the three front-runners, Sunak is the most accomplished, experienced and competent in dealing with complex policy issues. He would bring a seriousness of purpose to Downing Street and a rational approach to dealings with Europe — even if his position on the Northern Ireland protocol is the same as that of his rivals.
But Sunak has a diffident public style, and some MPs report that their local party members view his great wealth and international lifestyle as too remote from their own. The conventional wisdom at Westminster is that Sunak would lose in a run-off against either Truss or Mordaunt.
Truss is personally awkward and almost painfully stiff in public, as she demonstrated in a stilted, robotic performance at her campaign launch on Thursday. And although she has been a minister since 2012, she has never won a reputation for competence or mastery of detail.
Former Brexit minister David Frost denounced Mordaunt on Thursday, claiming that he had to ask Johnson to remove her from his team negotiating with the EU because she was so useless and unaccountable. Slurs about competence may sound a bit rich coming from the man who negotiated Britain’s withdrawal agreement so skilfully that he started trying to pull it apart within a few months.
It is nonetheless true that Mordaunt has not won glittering reviews from ministerial colleagues, and she has a reputation as a departmental lightweight. But she is alone among the front-runners in appearing to be comfortable in her own skin and having a natural, easy manner in public.
A Brexiteer who during the 2016 referendum campaign made the false assertion that Britain could not veto Turkey’s accession into the EU, Mordaunt appeals to traditional Conservative values. But the vision of Britain she outlines in her book Greater is upbeat and forward-looking as well as celebrating tradition, the armed forces and the flag.
Her concept of servant leadership, rooted in her background as a naval reservist, values institutions and other formal networks that bind citizens together. In this way, Mordaunt represents a clean break from Johnson’s reckless approach to government and disrespect for custom and norms.